A Polemic on Reading, Neither For Nor Against

“The causes of a revolution are usually sought in subjective conditions--general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words--uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified--frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.” (Kapuscinski 103)

And this is why I cannot understand those who say, “I love literature, but theory. Ugh, I hate theory.” Without theory, we cannot understand how words could be so powerful. Loving literature and hating theory creates a milieu in which literature is merely enjoyable and never earth-shaking. If a few tremors do surface, we have no way to connect them to each other, no way to show the rest of the world how the work we do can topple structures, both real and metaphorical.

In Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski records an interview with a man who specializes in pulling down monuments to the Shah. The man, Golam, describes the moment in 1953 when statues began to crumble yet again under the weight of released repression. He recalls “the radio saying that the Shah had escaped to Europe. When the people heard that, they went out into the street and started pulling down the monuments” (Kapuscinski 135). Even this man, not an intellectual, not a writer, just an actor playing his bit part to the fullest, even he recognizes the word as the spark and the subsequent piles of rubble as its consequences.

I’ve been reading Foucault lately, and under all the generalized theory and personalized jargon, he makes the same point as Kapuscinski about the importance of words. Words circumscribe the space in which we may act. The voices on the radio announcing the Shah’s departure redefined the space of that historical moment as a space in which stone and metal should explode the Shah’s shape, with the help of the people. In this new space, stone and metal can once again be just base materials, containing innumerable constellations of possible uses, free to be a road, a building, a copper filament, a disordered reminder of the true disorder of life. Before those possibilities, there was only the Shah, and his show of control. The statue, the monument, by forcing tons of material into a single shape repeated ad infinitum across an entire nation, contains all the tensions of a political system in which the appearance of order is the tissue separating injustice from righteous and active revolt. Words can tear this tissue.

We speak freely in our country, but our words have been cheapened. Demagogues on TV, half-baked romances in the bookstores, serious literature reserved for reading by serious literati. It is not that our injustices are so small that they do not need to be separated from the righteous anger that might correct them. It is rather that we have created our own intangible tissues which inscribe boundaries between people. Our country’s words have not created a space in which all action is possible. Instead, our words have created innumerable spaces in which we each move, thinking we are free, but unaware of the true freedom that merging these spaces together would bring. Instead, we defend to the last the arbitrary borderlines that demarcate what each of us can and cannot talk about, can and cannot be concerned with, can and cannot accomplish. In the end, those tissues exist, but our words do not tear them. Our words approach them, build bulwarks around them, bring us always back to our own comfortable space.

The literary debates about text, work, word, author, these debates matter. These debates could circulate freely, tunnel underground between spaces to create connections between them. We could use these debates consciously to find the ties between each instance of injustice, spread across the whole of experienced life. We could find the ties between injustice and the “official, uniformed, certified words” that would hide injustice from ourselves and from each other.

But we lose ourselves in the chaparrals of other debates, which are themselves self-contained in the limited spaces of ‘politics,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘rich people,’ ‘hobbies,’ ‘intellectualism.’ I would say, to combat losing the forest for the trees, that we should all read across these spaces. I truly believe that such a strategy could change the tenor of every conversation, every decision, every tiny shift in direction our country takes. But many do not read. Them, I do not judge, I do not wish to harangue into reading. Rather, I challenge those of us who study reading, who are willing to wade into the theory of reading, I challenge us to make use of the full potential of the word in other media. Television and radio are not the enemy. They may in fact be the saving grace.



Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage International, 1992. Print.